Don’t bend to Jewish, or
any, pressure but seek clarification by asking questions!

______________

BOOK
REVIEW

Mark Kurlansky, March 9,
2008

Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke: The
Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. Simon & Schuster:
576 pp., $30

_________________

'Human
Smoke' by Nicholson Baker:

An
inside look at the inexorable march of Britain and the United States toward
World War II.

Not
long ago, because there is no winter baseball in this country, I was channel
surfing in search of amusement and ended up watching a debate of Republican
presidential candidates. Sen. John McCain was attacking Rep. Ron Paul for
opposing the Iraq war. He called Paul an "isolationist" and said it
was that kind of thinking that had caused World War II. How old, I asked
myself, is John McCain, that he is keeping alive this ancient World War II
canard? Is it going to pass down to subsequent generations? All wars have to
be sold, but World War II, within the memory of the pointless carnage that
then became known as World War I, was a particularly hard sell. Roosevelt and
Churchill did it well, and their lies have been with us ever since.

Nicholson
Baker's Human
Smoke is a meticulously researched and well-constructed book
demonstrating that World War II was one of the biggest, most carefully plotted
lies in modern history. According to the myth, British and American statesmen
naively thought they could reason with such brutal fascists as Germany's
Hitler and Japan's Tojo. Faced with this weakness, Hitler and Tojo tried to
take over the world, and the United States and Britain were forced to use
military might to stop them.

Because
Baker is primarily a novelist, it might be expected that, having taken on this
weighty subject, he would write about it with great flare and drama. Readers
may initially be disappointed, yet one of this book's great strengths is that
it avoids flourishes in favor of the kind of lean prose employed by
journalists. "Human Smoke" is a series of well-written, brilliantly
ordered snapshots, the length of news dispatches. Baker states that he wanted
to raise these questions about World War II: "Was it a 'good war'? Did
waging it help anyone who needed help?" His very effective style is to
offer the facts and leave readers to draw their own conclusions.
The facts are powerful. Baker shows, step by step, how an alliance dominated
by leaders who were bigoted, far more opposed to communism than to fascism,
obsessed with arms sales and itching for a fight coerced the world into war.

Anti-Semitism
was rife among the Allies. Of Franklin Roosevelt, Baker notes that in 1922,
when he was a New York attorney, he "noticed that Jews made up one-third
of the freshman class at Harvard" and used his influence to establish a
Jewish quota there. For years he obstructed help for European Jewry, and as
late as 1939 he discouraged passage of the Wagner-Rogers bill, an attempt by
Congress to save Jewish children. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
said in 1939 of German treatment of Jews that "no doubt Jews aren't a
lovable people. I don't care about them myself." Once the war began,
Winston Churchill wanted to imprison German Jewish refugees because they were
Germans. What a comfort such leadership must have been to the Nazis, who,
according to the New York Times of Dec. 3, 1931, were trying to figure out a
way to rid Germany of Jews without "arousing foreign opinion."

Churchill
is a dominant figure in "Human Smoke," depicted as a bloodthirsty
warmonger who, in 1922, was still bemoaning the fact that World War I hadn't
lasted a little longer so that Britain could have had its air force in place
to bomb Berlin and "the heart of Germany." But no, he whined, it had
to stop, "owing to our having run short of Germans and enemies."
Churchill was not driven by anti-fascism. In his 1937 book "Great
Contemporaries," he described Hitler as "a highly competent, cool,
well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner." The same book
savagely attacked Leon Trotsky. (What was wrong with Trotsky? "He was
still a Jew. Nothing could get over that.")

Churchill
repeatedly praised Mussolini for his "gentle and simple bearing." In
1927, he told a Roman audience, "If I had been an Italian, I am sure that
I should have been entirely with you from the beginning to the end of your
victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of
Leninism." Churchill considered fascism "a necessary antidote to the
Russian virus," Baker writes. In 1938, he remarked to the press that if
England were ever defeated in war, he hoped "we should find a Hitler to
lead us back to our rightful position among nations."

As Baker's book makes clear, between the two World Wars communism, not
fascism, was the enemy. David Lloyd George, who had been Britain's prime
minister during World War I, cautioned in 1933, the year Hitler came to power,
that if the Allies managed to overthrow Nazism, "what would take its
place? Extreme communism. Surely that cannot be our objective." But even
more than the communists, Churchill's enemy No. 1 in the 1920s and early '30s
was Mohandas Gandhi and his doctrine of nonviolence, which Churchill warned
"will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally
crushed."

In the 1930s, U.S. industry was free to sell the Germans and the Japanese
whatever they'd buy, including weapons. Not to lose out, the British and
French sold tanks and bombers to Hitler. Calls by Joseph Tenenbaum of the
American Jewish Congress to boycott Germany were ignored. There was no attempt
to contain, isolate, hinder or overthrow Hitler -- not because of naiveté but
because of commerce. It was the Depression. There were Germans trying to
overthrow Hitler, but the U.S. and Britain and their industries were
obstructing that effort.

Baker
shows that the Japanese, as early as 1934, were complaining that Roosevelt was
deliberately provoking them. In January 1941, Japan protested the U.S.
military buildup in Hawaii. Joseph Grew, our ambassador to Japan, reported
rumors that the Japanese response would be a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Yet according to World War II mythology, America was blissfully sleeping,
unprepared for war, when caught by surprise by the dastardly "sneak
attack." (Isn't it curious that Asians carry out "sneak
attacks," whereas Westerners launch "preemptive strikes"?) A
year earlier, Baker shows, Roosevelt began planning the bombing of Japan --
which had invaded China, but with which we were not at war -- from Chinese air
bases with American planes and, when necessary, American pilots. Pearl Harbor
was a purely military target, but Roosevelt wanted to bomb Japanese cities
with incendiary bombs; he'd been assured that their cities would burn fast,
being made largely of wood and paper.

Roosevelt
evinced no desire to negotiate. In fact, Baker writes, in October he
"began leaking the news of his new war plan," with $100 billion
earmarked for airplanes alone. Grew again warned Roosevelt that he was pushing
Japan toward armed conflict with the United States, but the president
continued his war preparations. Finally, the night before the Japanese attack,
Roosevelt sent a message to Emperor Hirohito calling for talks. He read it to
the Chinese ambassador, remarking that he thought the message would "be
fine for the record."

People
are going to get really angry at Baker for criticizing their favorite war. But
he hasn't fashioned his tale from gossip. It is documented, with copious notes
and attributions. The grace of these well-ordered snapshots is that there is
no diatribe; you are left to put things together yourself. Read "Human
Smoke." It may be one of the most important books you will ever read. It
could help the world to understand that there is no Just War, there is just
war -- and that wars are not caused by isolationists and peaceniks but by the
promoters of warfare. *
Mark Kurlansky is a journalist and the author, most recently, of
"Nonviolence: 25 Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea."

It
makes me feel like a traitor to write this. The Second World War was my
religion for most of my life. Brave, alone, bombed, defiant, we, the British,
had won it on our own against the most evil and powerful enemy imaginable.
Born six years after it was over, I felt almost as if I had lived through it,
as my parents most emphatically had, with some bravery and much hardship in
both cases.

With
my toy soldiers, tanks and field-guns, I defeated the Nazis daily on my
bedroom floor. I lost myself in books with unembarrassed titles like Men Of
Glory, with their crisp, moving accounts of acts of incredible

bravery
by otherwise ordinary people who might have been my next-door neighbours. I
read the fictional adventures of RAF bomber ace Matt Braddock in the belief
that the stories were true, and not caring in the slightest about what
happened when his bombs hit the ground. I do now.

Heroism:
Tommies commandeer a German machine gun during battle for Caen in 1944

After
this came all those patriotic films that enriched the picture of decency,
quiet courage and self-mocking humour that I came to think of as being the
essence of Britishness. To this day I can't watch them without a catch in the
throat. This was our finest hour. It was the measure against which everything
else must be set. So it has been very hard for me since the doubts set in. I
didn't really want to know if it wasn't exactly like that. But it has rather
forced itself on me.

When
I lived in Russia at the end of the Soviet era, I found a country that made
even more of the war than we did. I even employed a splendid old Red Army war
veteran to help me set up my office there: an upright, totally reliable old
gentleman just like my father's generation, except that he was Russian and a
convinced Stalinist who did odd jobs for the KGB. They had their war films,
too. And their honourable scars. And they were just as convinced they had won
the war single-handed as we were. They regarded D-Day as a minor event and had
never heard of El Alamein.

Once
I caught myself thinking: "They're using the war as a way of comforting
themselves over their national decline, and over the way they're clearly
losing in their contest with America." And then it came to me that this
could be a description of my own country. When I lived in America itself,
where I discovered that the Second World War, in their view, took place mainly
in the Pacific, and in any case didn't matter half as much as the Civil War
and the Vietnam War, I got a second harsh, unwanted history lesson.

Now
here comes another. On a recent visit to the USA I picked up two new books
that are going to make a lot of people in Britain very angry. I read them,
unable to look away, much as it is hard to look away from a scene of disaster,
in a sort of cloud of dispirited darkness.

Same
story? British soldiers at Basra Palace during the Iraq War - a conflict
justified on the precedent of the Second World War

They
are a reaction to the use - in my view, abuse - of the Second World War to
justify the Iraq War. We were told that the 1939-45 war was a good war, fought
to overthrow a wicked tyrant, that the war in Iraq would be the same, and that
those who opposed it were like the discredited appeasers of 1938.

Well,
I didn't feel much like Neville Chamberlain (a man I still despise) when I
argued against the Iraq War. And I still don't. Some of those who opposed the
Iraq War ask a very disturbing question. The people who sold us Iraq did so as
if they were today's Churchills. They were wrong. In that case, how can we be
sure that Churchill's war was a good war? What if the Men of Glory didn't need
to die or risk their lives? What if the whole thing was a miscalculated waste
of life and wealth that destroyed Britain as a major power and turned her into
a bankrupt pensioner of the USA? Funnily enough, these questions echo equally
uncomfortable ones I'm often asked by readers here. The milder version is:
"Who really won the war, since Britain is now subject to a German-run
European Union?"

The
other is one I hear from an ever-growing number of war veterans contemplating
modern Britain's landscape of loutishness and disorder and recalling the
sacrifices they made for it: "Why did we bother?" Don't read on if
these questions rock your universe.

The
two books, out in this country very soon, are Patrick Buchanan's Churchill,
Hitler And The Unnecessary War and Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke. I know Pat
Buchanan and respect him, but I have never liked his sympathy for
"America First", the movement that tried to keep the USA out of the
Second World War.

As
for Nicholson Baker, he has become famous only because his phone-sex novel, Vox,
was given as a present to Bill Clinton by Monica Lewinsky. Human Smoke
is not a novel but a series of brief factual items deliberately arranged to
undermine the accepted story of the war, and it has received generous
treatment from the American mainstream, especially the New York Times. Baker
is a pacifist, a silly position open only to citizens of free countries with
large navies. He has selected with care to suit his position, but many of the
facts here, especially about Winston Churchill and Britain's early enthusiasm
for bombing civilian targets, badly upset the standard view.

In
his element:Churchill preferred war to peace, claims U.S.
author Patrick Buchanan

Here
is Churchill, in a 1920 newspaper article, allegedly railing against the
"sinister confederacy" of international Jewry. I say
"allegedly" because I have not seen the original. I also say it
because I am reluctant to believe it, as I am reluctant to believe another
Baker snippet which suggests that Franklin Roosevelt was involved in a scheme
to limit the number of Jews at Harvard University. Such things today would end
a political career in an instant. Many believe the 1939-45 war was fought to
save the Jews from Hitler. No facts support this fond belief. If the war saved
any Jews, it was by accident.

Its
outbreak halted the "Kindertransport" trains rescuing Jewish
children from the Third Reich. We ignored credible reports from Auschwitz and
refused to bomb the railway tracks leading to it. Baker is also keen to show
that Hitler's decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe came only after the
war was fully launched, and that before then, although his treatment of the
Jews was disgusting and homicidal, it stopped well short of industrialised
mass murder.

The
implication of this, that the Holocaust was a result of the war, not a cause
of it, is specially disturbing. A lot of people will have trouble, also, with
the knowledge that Churchill said of Hitler in 1937, when the nature of his
regime was well known: "A highly competent, cool, well informed
functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been
unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism."

Three
years later, the semi-official view, still pretty much believed, was that
Hitler was the devil in human form and more or less insane. Buchanan is, in a
way, more damaging. He portrays Churchill as a man who loved war for its own
sake, and preferred it to peace. As the First World War began in 1914, two
observers, Margot Asquith and David Lloyd George, described Churchill as
"radiant, his face bright, his manner keen ... you could see he was a
really happy man".

Churchill
also (rightly) gets it in the neck from Buchanan for running down British
armed forces between the wars. It was Churchill who, as Chancellor of the
Exchequer, demanded deep cuts in the Royal Navy in 1925, so when he adopted
rearmament as his cause ten years later, it was his own folly he was railing
against.

Well,
every country needs men who like war, if it is to stand and fight when it has
to. And we all make mistakes, which are forgotten if we then get one thing
spectacularly right, as Churchill did. Americans may take or leave Mr
Buchanan's views about whether they should have stayed out, but the USA did
very well out of a war in which Britain and Russia did most of the fighting,
while Washington pocketed (and still keeps) most of the benefits.

Surveying
Buchanan's chilly summary, I found myself distressed by several questions. The
First and Second World Wars, as Buchanan says, are really one conflict.

Blood
brothers:

By
Christmas 1940, Stalin (right) had murdered many more people than Hitler, and
had invaded nearly as many countries

We
went to war with the Kaiser in 1914 mainly because we feared being overtaken
by Germany as the world's greatest naval power. Yet one of the main results of
the war was that we were so weakened we were overtaken instead by the USA. We
were also forced, by American pressure, to end our naval alliance with Japan,
which had protected our Far Eastern Empire throughout the 1914-18 war. This
decision, more than any other, cost us that Empire. By turning Japan from an
ally into an enemy, but without the military or naval strength to guard our
possessions, we ensured that we would be easy meat in 1941.

After
the fall of Singapore in 1942, our strength and reputation in Asia were
finished for good and our hurried scuttle from India unavoidable. Worse still
is Buchanan's analysis of how we went to war. I had always thought the moment
we might have stopped Hitler was when he reoccupied the Rhineland on March 7,
1936. But Buchanan records that nobody was interested in such action at the
time. Nobody? Yes. That includes Churchill, who said fatuously on March 13:
"Instead of retaliating by armed force, as would have been done in a
previous generation, France has taken the proper and prescribed course of
appealing to the League of Nations." He then even more wetly urged
"Herr Hitler" to do the decent thing and withdraw.

Buchanan
doesn't think that Britain and France could have saved Czechoslovakia in 1938,
and I suspect he is right. But this is a minor issue beside his surgical
examination of Britain's guarantee to help Poland in March 1939. Hitler saw
our "stand" as an empty bluff, and called it. The Poles were crushed
and murdered, and their country erased from the map. Hitler's eventual defeat
left Poland under the Soviet heel for two generations.

We
then embarked on a war which cost us our Empire, many of our best export
markets, what was left of our naval supremacy, and most of our national wealth
- gleefully stripped from us by Roosevelt in return for Lend-Lease supplies.
As a direct result we sought membership of a Common Market that has since bled
away our national independence. Would we not have been wiser to behave as the
USA did, staying out of it and waiting for Hitler and Stalin to rip out each
other's bowels?

Was
Hitler really set on a war with Britain or on smashing the British Empire? The
country most interested in dismantling our Empire was the USA. Hitler never
built a surface navy truly capable of challenging ours and, luckily for us, he
left it too late to build enough submarines to starve us out. He was very
narrowly defeated in the Battle of Britain, but how would we have fared if, a
year later, he had used the forces he flung at Russia to attack us instead?
But he didn't. His "plan" to invade Britain, the famous Operation
Sealion, was only a sketchy afterthought, quickly abandoned. Can it be true
that he wasn't very interested in fighting or invading us? His aides were
always baffled by his admiration for the British Empire, about which he would
drone for hours.

Of
course he was an evil dictator. But so was Joseph Stalin, who would later
become our honoured ally, supplied with British weapons, fawned on by our
Press and politicians, including Churchill himself. By Christmas 1940, Stalin
had in fact murdered many more people than Hitler and had invaded nearly as
many countries. We almost declared war on him in 1940 and he ordered British
communists to subvert our war effort against the Nazis during the Battle of
Britain. And, in alliance with Hitler, he was supplying the Luftwaffe with
much of the fuel and resources it needed to bomb London.

Not
so simple, is it? Survey the 20th Century and you see Britain repeatedly
fighting Germany, at colossal expense. No one can doubt the valour and
sacrifice involved.

But
at the end of it all, Germany dominates Europe behind the smokescreen of the
EU; our Empire and our rule of the seas have gone, we struggle with all the
problems of a great civilisation in decline, and our special friend, the USA,
has smilingly supplanted us for ever. But we won the war.

•
Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker, is
published on May 6 by Simon and Schuster. Churchill, Hitler And The
Unnecessary War, by Patrick Buchanan, is
published on May 13 by Crown Publishing.

Is
there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus
rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from
abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the
widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was
a "good war" and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one
indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal
tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella as he turned from signing the
Czechs away to Adolf
Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation to avert war, but he was
fated to bring his countrymen war on top of humiliation. To the conventional
wisdom add the titanic figure of Winston
Churchill as the emblem of oratorical defiance and the Horatius who, until
American power could be mobilized and deployed, alone barred the bridge to the
forces of unalloyed evil. When those forces lay finally defeated, their
ghastly handiwork was uncovered to a world that mistakenly thought it had
already "supped full of horrors." The stark evidence of the Final
Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the
wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.

Historical
scholarship has nevertheless offered various sorts of revisionist
interpretation of all this. Niall Ferguson, for one, has proposed looking at
the two world wars as a single conflict, punctuated only by a long and ominous
armistice. British conservative historians like Alan Clark and John Charmley
have criticized Churchill for building his career on war, for ignoring
openings to peace and for eventually allowing the British Empire to be
squandered and broken up. But Pat
Buchanan, twice a candidate for the Republican nomination and in 2000 the
standard-bearer for the Reform Party who ignited a memorable "chad"
row in Florida, has now condensed all the antiwar arguments into one. His
case, made in his recently released "Churchill, Hitler and the
Unnecessary War," is as follows:

·That Germany
was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939.

·Britain
in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland.

·That Winston Churchill was the
principal British warmonger on both occasions.

·The United States was needlessly
dragged into war on both occasions.

·That the principal beneficiaries
of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

·That the Holocaust of European
Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi
racism.[You
Fool, Christopher, for believing in the Holocaust LIE because your argument
then rests on a false premise – ed.]

Buchanan
does not need to close his book with an invocation of a dying West, as if to
summarize this long recital of Spenglerian doomsaying. He's already opened
with the statement, "All about us we can see clearly now that the West is
passing away." The tropes are familiar—a loss of will and confidence, a
collapse of the desire to reproduce with sufficient vigor, a preference for
hedonism over the stern tasks of rulership and dominion and pre-eminence. It
all sounds oddly … Churchillian. The old lion himself never tired of
striking notes like these, and was quite unembarrassed by invocations of race
and nation and blood. Yet he is the object of Buchanan's especial dislike and
contempt, because he had a fondness for "wars of choice."

This
term has enjoyed a recent vogue because of the opposition to the war in Iraq,
an opposition in which Buchanan has played a vigorous role. Descending as he
does from the tradition of Charles Lindbergh's America First movement, which
looked for (and claimed to have found) a certain cosmopolitan lobby behind
FDR's willingness to involve the United States in global war, Buchanan is the
most trenchant critic of what he considers our fondest national illusion, and
his book has the feel and stamp of a work that he has been readying all his
life.

But
he faces an insuperable difficulty, or rather difficulties. If you want to
demonstrate that Germany was more the victim than the aggressor in 1914, then
you must confine your account (as Buchanan does) to the very minor legal
question of Belgian neutrality and of whether Britain absolutely had to go to
war on the Belgian side. (For what it may be worth, I think that Britain
wasn't obliged to do so and should not have done.) But the rest of the
Kaiser’s policy, most of it completely omitted by Buchanan, shows that
Germany was looking for a chance for war all over the globe, and was
increasingly the prisoner of a militaristic ruling caste at home. The Kaiser
picked a fight with Britain by backing the white Dutch Afrikaner rebels in
South Africa and by butchering the Ovambo people of what is now Namibia. He
looked for trouble with the French by abruptly sending warships to Agadir in
French Morocco, which nearly started the first world war in 1905, and with
Russia by backing Austria-Hungary's insane ultimatum to the Serbs after the
June 1914 assassinations in Sarajevo. Moreover, and never mentioned by
Buchanan at all, the Kaiser visited Damascus and paid for the rebuilding of
the tomb of Saladin, announced himself a sympathizer of Islam and a friend of
jihad, commissioned a Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad for the projection of German
arms into the Middle East and Asia and generally ranged himself on the side of
an aggressive Ottoman imperialism, which later declared a "holy war"
against Britain. To suggest that he felt unjustly hemmed in by the Royal
Navy's domination of the North Sea while he was conducting such statecraft is
absurd.

And
maybe a little worse than absurd, as when Buchanan writes: "From 1871 to
1914, the Germans under Bismarck and the Kaiser did not fight a single war.
While Britain, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Japan, Spain, and the United States were
all involved in wars, Germany and Austria had clean records." I am bound
to say that I find this creepy. The start of the "clean record" has
to be in 1871, because that's the year that Prussia humbled France in the
hideous Franco-Prussian War that actually annexed two French provinces to
Germany. In the intervening time until 1914, Germany was seizing colonies in
Africa and the Pacific, cementing secret alliances with Austria and trying to
build up a naval fleet that could take on the British one. No wonder the
Kaiser wanted a breathing space.

Now,
this is not to say that Buchanan doesn't make some sound points about the
secret diplomacy of Old Europe that was so much to offend Woodrow Wilson. And
he is excellent on the calamitous Treaty of Versailles that succeeded
only—as was noted by John Maynard Keynes at the time—in creating the
conditions for another world war, or for part two of the first one. He wears
his isolationism proudly: "The Senate never did a better day's work than
when it rejected the Treaty of Versailles and refused to enter a League of
Nations where American soldiers would be required to give their lives
enforcing the terms of so dishonorable and disastrous a peace."

Actually,
no soldier of any nation ever lost so much as a fingernail in the service of
the League, which was in any case doomed by American abstention, and it's
exactly that consideration which invalidates the second half of Buchanan's
argument, which is that a conflict with Hitler's Germany both could and should
have been averted. (There is a third Buchanan sub-argument, mostly made by
implication, which is that the democratic West should have allied itself with
Hitler, at least passively, until he had destroyed the Soviet Union.)

Again,
in order to believe his thesis one has to be prepared to argue that Hitler was
a rational actor with intelligible and negotiable demands, whose declared,
demented ambitions in "Mein Kampf" were presumably to be disregarded
as mere propaganda. In case after case Buchanan shows the abysmal bungling of
British and French diplomacy—making promises to Czechoslovakia that could
never have been kept and then, adding injury to insult, breaking those
promises at the first opportunity. Or offering a guarantee to Poland (a
country that had gleefully taken part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia)
that Hitler well knew was not backed by any credible military force.

Buchanan
is at his best here, often causing one to whistle at the sheer cynicism and
stupidity of the British Tories. In the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June
1935, for example, they astounded the French and Italians and Russians by
unilaterally agreeing to permit Hitler to build a fleet one third the size of
the Royal Navy and a submarine fleet of the same size as the British! Not only
was this handing the Third Reich the weapon it would soon press to Britain's
throat, it was convincing all Britain's potential allies that they would be
much better off making their own bilateral deals with Berlin. Which is
essentially what happened.

But
Buchanan keeps forgetting that this criminal foolishness is exactly the sort
of policy that he elsewhere recommends. In his view, after all, Germany had
been terribly wronged by Versailles and it would have been correct to redraw
the frontiers in Germany's favor and soothe its hurt feelings (which is what
the word "appeasement" originally meant).

Meanwhile
we should have encouraged Hitler's hostility to Bolshevism and discreetly
rearmed in case he should also need to be contained. This might perhaps have
worked if Germany had been governed by a right-wing nationalist party that had
won a democratic vote.

However,
in point of fact Germany was governed by an ultra-rightist, homicidal,
paranoid maniac who had begun by demolishing democracy in Germany itself, who
believed that his fellow countrymen were a superior race and who attributed
all the evils in the world to a Jewish conspiracy. It is possible to read
whole chapters of Buchanan's book without having to bear these salient points
in mind. (I should say that I intend this observation as a criticism.) As with
his discussion of pre-1914 Germany, he commits important sins of omission that
can only be the outcome of an ideological bias. Barely mentioned except in
passing is the Spanish Civil War, for example, where for three whole years
between 1936 and 1939 Germany and Italy lent troops and weapons in a Fascist
invasion of a sovereign European nation that had never threatened or
"encircled" them in any way. Buchanan's own political past includes
overt sympathy with General Franco, which makes this skating-over even less
forgivable than it might otherwise be.

On
the one occasion where Spain does get a serious mention, it illustrates the
opposite point to the one Buchanan thinks he's making. The British ambassador
in Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, is explaining why Hitler didn't believe that
Britain and France would fight over Prague: "[Hitler] argued as follows:
Would the German nation willingly go to war for General Franco in Spain, if
France intervened on the side of the Republican government? The answer that he
gave himself is that it would not, and he was consequently convinced that no
democratic French government would be strong enough to lead the French nation
to war for the Czechs."

In
this instance, it must be admitted, Hitler was being a rational actor. And his
admission—which Buchanan in his haste to indict Anglo-French policy
completely fails to notice—is that if he himself had been resisted earlier
and more determinedly, he would have been compelled to give ground. Thus the
whole and complete lesson is not that the second world war was an avoidable
"war of choice." It is that the Nazis could and should have been
confronted before they had fully rearmed and had begun to steal the factories
and oilfields and coal mines and workers of neighboring countries. As Gen.
Douglas MacArthur once put it, all military defeats can be summarized in the
two words: "Too late." The same goes for political disasters.

As
the book develops, Buchanan begins to unmask his true colors more and more. It
is one thing to make the case that Germany was ill-used, and German minorities
harshly maltreated, as a consequence of the 1914 war of which Germany's grim
emperor was one of the prime instigators.
It's quite another thing to say that the Nazi decision to embark on a
Holocaust of European Jewry was "not a cause of the war but an awful
consequence of the war."

Not
only is Buchanan claiming that Hitler's fanatical racism did not hugely
increase the likelihood of war, but he is also making the insinuation that
those who wanted to resist him are the ones who are equally if not indeed
mainly responsible for the murder of the Jews! This absolutely will not do. He
adduces several quotations from Hitler and Goebbels, starting only in 1939 and
ending in 1942, screaming that any outbreak of war to counter Nazi ambitions
would lead to a terrible vengeance on the Jews. He forgets—at least I hope
it's only forgetfulness—that such murderous incitement began long, long
before Hitler had even been a lunatic-fringe candidate in the 1920s. This
"timeline" is as spurious, and as sinister, as the earlier dates, so
carefully selected by Buchanan, that tried to make Prussian imperialism look
like a victim rather than a bully.

One
closing example will demonstrate the corruption and prejudice of Buchanan's
historical "method." He repeatedly argues that Churchill did not
appreciate Hitler's deep-seated and respectful Anglophilia, and he continually
blames the war on several missed opportunities to take the Führer's genially
outstretched hand. Indeed, he approvingly quotes several academic sources who
agree with him that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union only in order to change
Britain's mind. Suppose that Buchanan is in fact correct about this. Could we
have a better definition of derangement and megalomania than the case of a
dictator who overrules his own generals and invades Russia in wintertime,
mainly to impress the British House of Commons? (Incidentally, or rather not
incidentally, it was precisely that hysterical aggression that curtain-raised
the organized deportation and slaughter of the Jews. But it's fatuous to
suppose that, without that occasion, the Nazis would not have found another
one.)

It
is of course true that millions of other people lost their lives in this
conflict, often in unprecedentedly horrible ways, and that new tyrannies were
imposed on the countries—Poland, Czechoslovakia and China most
notably—that had been the pretexts for a war against fascism. But is this
not to think in the short term? Unless or until Nazism had been vanquished,
millions of people were most certainly going to be either massacred or
enslaved in any case. Whereas today, all the way from Portugal to the Urals,
the principle of human rights and popular sovereignty is at least the norm,
and the ideas of racism and totalitarianism have been fairly conclusively and
historically discredited. Would a frightened compromise with racist
totalitarianism have produced a better result?

Winston
Churchill may well have been on the wrong side about India, about the gold
standard, about the rights of labor and many other things, and he may have had
a lust for war, but we may also be grateful that there was one politician in
the 1930s who found it intolerable even to breathe the same air, or share the
same continent or planet, as the Nazis. (Buchanan of course makes plain that
he rather sympathizes with Churchill about the colonies, and quarrels only
with his "finest hour." This is grotesque.)

As
he closes his argument, Buchanan again refuses to disguise his allegiance.
"Though derided as isolationists," he writes, "the America
First patriots kept the United States out of the war until six months after
Hitler had invaded Russia." If you know anything at all about what
happened to the population of those territories in those six months, it is
rather hard to be proud that America was neutral. But this is a price that
Buchanan is quite willing to pay.

I
myself have written several criticisms of the cult of Churchill, and of the
uncritical way that it has been used to stifle or cudgel those with
misgivings. ("Adlai," said John F. Kennedy of his outstanding U.N.
ambassador during the Bay of Pigs crisis, "wanted a Munich.") Yet
the more the record is scrutinized and re-examined, the more creditable it
seems that at least two Western statesmen, for widely different reasons,
regarded coexistence with Nazism as undesirable as well as impossible. History
may judge whether the undesirability or the impossibility was the more salient
objection, but any attempt to separate the two considerations is likely to
result in a book that stinks, as this one unmistakably does.

NO October Surprise...NOT Another War...NO October Surprise...NOT
Another War

September
27National Day of Action to Stop War on
Iran!Help build locally-coordinated actions in 100 citiesMarch, rally, speak out, picket, teach-ins - in cities large or
small, campuses & schools
what you do can make a difference

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Only
the People can stop the war...Stop the War on Iran before
it starts!Money for
Jobs, Healthcare, and Education, Not War and Occupation!